England to head to Bangalore on Friday
Chandresh Narayanan
Thursday, November 27, 2008 9:08:24 PM
Bhubhaneshwar: After having decided to abandon their seven-match one-day series in the light of the terror attacks at various places in Mumbai, the England team will now be heading out of India on Friday afternoon.
Earlier in the day, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) held meetings with N Srinivasan, the secretary of the BCCI, and the two boards mutually agreed to call off the ongoing one-day series.
Hugh Morris, the managing director of the ECB, also announced that the ECB would continue to monitor the situation in India and then decide their future course of action depending on inputs they receive from their security agencies.
Cricket Nirvana has learnt that the England team will fly out of Bhubhaneshwar to Bangalore on Friday morning and will spent the night in a hotel in the Garden City, before taking a flight out of there to London on Saturday morning, and then return in two weeks time for the Test series, pending a clearance by the security authorities of the ECB. It is also being reported that the ECB will consult the British High Commissioner in India in ten days time to find out about the situation in India.
It is being reported that the BCCI has decided to shift the second Test match out of Mumbai, which witnessed widespread terror attacks on Wednesday and Thursday, and are contemplating either Kolkata or Chennai as possible alternatives.
Earlier in the day, Lalit Modi, the vice-president of the BCCI, announced that the BCCI had ruled out shifting the Test match out of Mumbai and was looking at moving it down south. "The first Test will go ahead on the 11th in Ahmedabad. The second Test which was to be played in Mumbai, we at the BCCI have agreed to move that Test. We are looking where to reschedule it. Chances are it may be somewhere in the south of India. We are just looking at where to play that," he had said.
In such circumstances, it looks more or less likely that Chennai will now host the second Test match. An announcement on the decision to shift the Mumbai Test to Chennai is expected later on Thursday night.
